Wednesday, October 13, 2021

The Traditional Mass and Diversity

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Venerating Our Lady of Walsingham at the end of the
LMS Walking Pilgrimage in August this year.

My latest on 1Peter5

In a recent article in the Illinois Times, Massimo Faggioli, a theology professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia, is quoted as follows, of a specific Traditional Mass location:

It’s not an accident that all of these Catholics at the old Mass are white, because one of the things that happened after Vatican II was an ‘inculturation’ of the liturgy. …The Latin Mass is white and European by its definition, because it’s a product of the Catholic Church of the 16th century. So, this is creating serious problems because it is never limited to the liturgy only, but it is always the first step to saying Vatican II was a disaster.

I would far rather ignore these childish accusations, but I fear that if they are repeated frequently enough without rebuttal they will become established as part of the liberal narrative about the Traditional Latin Mass. But in order to shoe-horn the movement for the ancient Mass into the role of the bad guys in some racially-charged political confrontation, Faggioli needs to distort the past and ignore the present. Let’s start with the past.

Read the whole thing there.

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3 comments:

  1. And yet we have a Cardinal of African origin who was, presumably, brought up with the Latin Mass? This seems to quash the idea of the Latin Mass being somehow white does it not? What about the Ugandan martyrs who were raised with the Latin Mass.

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  2. The 'Trads racism' argument is the one I hate the most. I have found that congregations at the TLM tend to be far more racially and culturally mixed than congregations at the Ordinary Form. So often 'ordinary' Catholic Churches seem to consist exclusively of White Middle Class people (like me) and I rather like attending services where all races and classes mix which is what I find at the TLM services I attend.

    Frankly the real racist is Massimo Fagioli who has the temerity to assume that he knows what other races want

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  3. If ethnic diversity is our goal, I presume Prof. Faggioli is opposed to the practice of having separate Masses for separate linguistic groups -- a Spanish Mass for the Hispanic community, a Polish Mass for the Poles, etc.? Encouraging people to self-segregate based on language is hardly conducive to diversity.

    It’s not an accident that all of these Catholics at the old Mass are white, because one of the things that happened after Vatican II was an ‘inculturation’ of the liturgy. …The Latin Mass is white and European by its definition, because it’s a product of the Catholic Church of the 16th century.

    So the Latin Mass is the inculturated version of the Mass for white Europeans? Then why can't I, a white European, be allowed to attend it? Why is inculturation treated as a good thing for every other culture but mine?

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